When You're Living in a Black and White World

Saw a surprise knockout of a movie on TCM a few weeks back--City Streets, a pre-Code, Prohibition-era (1931) gangster action romance starring an astonishingly young and slim Gary Cooper and Sylvia Sydney (almost improbably beautiful and flower-fresh) as lovebirds who run afoul of the racket bosses and have to beat it out of town before they get a bad case of flying bullets. Directed by Rouben Mamoulian and photographed by Lee Garmes (who shot a number of von Sternberg films), City Streets is one of the most beautifully composed, shadow-rich noirish Thirties movies I've ever seen and yet fluid, fleet, kinetic, with a phenomenal speeding car scene for the finale where the camera pulls back and we see a gun pointed toward to back seat in a silhouette framed within the passenger side window that will make you want to applaud at its bravura. And the coda, three gangsters hoofiing it back to town in dusty dawn light and burst of birds in the sky, ends it with a signature flourish.

Although City Streets is seldom shown, little known, and so far unavailable on DVD, it's intact, handsomely preserved, a small, saved treasure.

But spare a thought for those film noirs that are lost, neglected, stranded in the alley with the Tombstone Blues, in crying need of reclamation and restoration.

One of the guardian angels of this blogathon, the film blogger and beloved children's book author known as the Siren, has an interview with Eddie Muller of the Film Noir Foundation that lays out what's at stake in noir restoration and why such films are worth rescuing from falling by the wayside:

Eddie Muller: One of these three recent preservations, High Wall (1947), was already digitally transferred and available as a manufactured-on-demand DVD. But there was no longer a 35mm print of the film. We felt that it was a significant enough example of film noir that it merited being preserved in its original format. So we paid to strike a new print from the original negative, and that print will be archived at UCLA. It can be shown, with the permission of the Film Noir Foundation and rental payment to Warner Bros., in venues certified by the Federation of International Film Archives (FIAF). I really wanted to show that film at the last San Francisco NOIR CITY festival, where I always make a big deal out of screening films not available on DVD. Well, when I created the program High Wall wasn’t on DVD, but then it was added to the Warner Archive Collection because they had a digital master, probably from when it was shown on Turner Classic Movies. Regardless, High Wall is an important film in terms of how movies in the forties dealt with veterans’ issues, mental illness, etc. So I felt that it was essential it exist in the form it was created, and not just as a DVD.

Is that quixotic, or redundant? I don’t think so. Current digital technology may be obsolete within the next 20 years as the marketplace inexorably pushes for newer delivery systems. We cannot predict the future, and have little control over it. What we can do is protect what we know is valuable from our past. If you save a film in its original form, and preserve it, it doesn’t matter it the technology changes another 20 times
the film will always be there, available to future generations. (Along with preserving films, of course, we need to be preserving projectionists!)

When we do a restoration, it generally means no pre-print material exists. The goal is to create, from various sources, a new negative from which prints can be struck in perpetuity. These are more labor-intensive, long-range projects, where you have to really scour the earth for material. You don’t want to get in the middle of a restoration and then discover a decent negative of the film in an archive somewhere. We’re finally “cornering” Too Late for Tears after several years sourcing prints. We may have enough now to actually restore that film with confidence.

Siren: What's the ultimate goal of a Film Noir Foundation restoration project?

Eddie: To me, it’s two-fold: to ensure that films will exist for future generations as they were originally created—and, just as significantly for me, to respect the artists who created these films by refusing to let their work vanish or degenerate.

Siren: How does the foundation determine which films it will choose to restore?

Eddie: Well, it better be a good movie. I know that’s a little subjective from a pure preservationist’s perspective, but it’s the first thing I think of. Is it a good story? We also consider its historical significance. The Prowler, for example, was an obvious choice. A “lost” Losey film and one of his best; a script written by Dalton Trumbo during his blacklisting, produced (silently) by John Huston and Sam Spiegel, and its cachet as being a very smart and subversive film that had literally slipped through the cracks.

Much the same is true of The Sound of Fury, because of Cy Endfield’s blacklisting and the film’s pertinence to the hysteria of the anti-communist witch-hunt. But we have no agenda—Cry Danger and Too Late for Tears have no political significance at all. They’re simply terrific films, and that’s more than enough reason to preserve them. Bottom line, it’s not much more complicated than saying, “People need to see this!”

It’s also important to understand that restoring a film isn’t merely about posterity. It can give a film new life, and in some cases led to a reassessment of an artist’s work, and a very valuable sense of cultural completion. I think of some of these missing titles as “ghost films,” and when we restore them we are actually bringing them back to life.